This application claims the priority of Korean Patent Application No. 10-2004-0091498, filed on Nov. 10, 2004, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a damper for an information storage device and, more particularly, to a damper shaped effectively to damp shocks or vibrations applied to an information storage device mounted inside an electronic device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Information storage devices record data on a storage medium, such as a magnetic disk or an optical disk, or reproduce data recorded on the storage medium. For example, read/write heads mounted on an actuator in a hard disk drive (HDD) record or reproduce data on a disk by being moved to a desired position while flying a predetermined height above a recording surface of the rotating disk. Such information storage devices have been mainly used as auxiliary memory devices of computers. With recent technological developments, however, the information storage devices can be made compact such that they are now increasingly employed in mobile electronic devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), camcorders, MP3 players, and mobile phones.
When the compact information storage devices are mounted in the mobile electronic devices, it is highly possible that the information storage devices are affected by external shocks or vibrations because the mobile electronic devices are often carried. If shocks or vibrations are applied to the information storage devices, internal elements or data stored on storage media (e.g., disks) inside the information storage devices may be damaged, resulting in deterioration of the performance of the information storage devices.
To solve the problems, various buffering structures are employed in the information storage devices mounted inside the mobile electronic devices.
FIG. 1 is a schematic cross-sectional view of a conventional buffering structure employed in an information storage device mounted inside an electronic device.
Referring to FIG. 1, an information storage device, for example, a hard disk drive (HDD) 20, may be mounted inside a mobile electronic device 10. Here, buffering dampers 30 are interposed between both surfaces of the HDD 20 and inner surfaces of the electronic device 10 facing the surfaces of the HDD 20. The dampers 30 are generally made of a viscoelastic material to absorb and reduce external shocks or vibrations transferred to the HDD 20 through the electronic device 10. Accordingly, even though external shocks or vibrations are applied to the electronic device 10, shocks or vibrations transferred to the HDD 20 can be reduced to some degree.
Each of the conventional buffering dampers 30 has a thin plate shape with a predetermined thickness as shown in FIG. 1 and has both surfaces closely contacting the surfaces of the electronic device 10 and the HDD 20.
Accordingly, external shocks or vibrations applied to the electronic device 10 are straightly transferred to the HDD 20 through the thin dampers 30. As such, since paths along which shocks or vibrations are transferred are very short, if relatively great external shocks or vibrations are applied to the electronic device 10, the dampers 30 cannot ensure a satisfactory buffering performance.